An evening of symphony music

Music was made for the inexpressible...
Claude Debussy
L’Après-midi d’un faune (1894) by Claude Debussy (1862–1918) bears the secondary title of Prélude à l’églogue de Mallarmé.
In Ancient Greek and Roman and, later, European poetry an eclogue was a poem on a theme about country life, close to an idyll or a pastorale. Stéphane Mallarmé’s eclogue was initially intended for declamation, to be depicted by dance. It was an attempt to revive the Ancient tradition where the aulos-player (the aulos being an Ancient two-pipe flute), as well as playing the instrument, would also dance or move to the rhythm of the music.
In Mallarmé’s poetry Debussy was looking for the harmony and the syncretism (meaning the union of art forms) that had been lost since Ancient times.

Try then, instrument of flights, O malign
Syrinx by the lake where you await me, to flower again!
I, proud of my murmur, intend to speak at length
Of goddesses: and with idolatrous paintings
Remove again from shadow their waists’ bindings:
So that when I’ve sucked the grapes’ brightness
To banish a regret done away with by my pretence,
Laughing, I raise the emptied stem to the summer’s sky...

There survives this explanatory text, probably compiled by Debussy himself or at least with his involvement. “The music of this prelude is a very free illustration of Mallarmé’s beautiful poetry. It makes absolutely no pretence at synthesis with the poetry. It is more of a series of scenes, one after another, among which one can see the faun’s desires and daydreams in the sultry heat of the afternoon. Fatigued by his pursuit of the nymphs who flee in fright, he then surrenders to an enticing sleep which is filled with dreams of the :fullness of conquering nature that have finally come to be.”
Mallarmé himself admitted that Debussy’s music conveyed his poem with great precision. When the composer played his prelude to the poet on the piano (specifically the piano, without any of the wonderful orchestral timbres!), this is what the latter said: “I never expected anything of the kind! This music is a continuation of the emotion of my poem and draws it with greater passion than any colours could ever convey.” In 1912 Vaslav Nijinsky staged L’Après-midi d’un faune for Diaghilev’s Ballets russes, he himself performing the lead role. Debussy had the good fortune to see the ballet performed.

Initially, The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra (Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Purcell) by Benjamin Britten was composed as music for a documentary detailing the instruments in a symphony orchestra. Very quickly, the work won popularity as a concert opus.
Audiences of all ages, old and young alike, follow the transformation of a theme from the music by Henry Purcell for the play Abdelazer, or The Moor’s Revenge with tremendous enjoyment. The form of the variations assisted the embodiment of Britten’s concept, allowing each individual instrument to demonstrate, “in bold”, its role in the orchestra, its “individual” timbre and specific technique.
Beginning with the imposing use of the theme in a powerful tutti involving the entire orchestra, the composer “brings on-stage” each of the orchestral sections in turn: wind – woodwind and brass – and strings, then percussion... He then blends them all together once more in a combined chorus. In the subsequent variations, one after another each instrument is given its voice. The variations reveal the personality of each “character” and, at the same time, speak of the composer’s skill and incredibly rich inventiveness. It was not by chance that one critic referred to the work as “A Guide to Britten.” In line with tradition, the series of variations ends with a dazzlingly written fugue in which the voices of the instruments once again take up the same sequence as in the variations. In the culminating coda, against a background of the emerging fugue, Purcell’s theme resounds victoriously, crowning this unusual musical “guide”.

The libretto of the opera Peter Grimes which brought Britten international acclaim is based on a poem by George Crabbe (1754–1832) that depicts the life of a fishing village on the eastern coast of England. Following his librettist (Montagu Slater), the composer reworked the character of the protagonist of the poem, the fisherman Peter Grimes. In the opera he is not just a rough and cruel ne’er-do-well and a reluctant murderer, but also a vivid personality who stands out from the stagnating environment that surrounds him. We can readily draw parallels with Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (which Britten adored!), in which the composer also “musically justified” his protagonist Katerina Ismailova, portraying the social and human drama of a lonely and powerful personality in a new light. The analogy, as we will see, goes much farther than the coincidences of the plot and the psychology of the work. The musical structure of Peter Grimes has much in common with Shostakovich’s opera. The impetuous flow of the musical development never lets up, not for a second, thanks to the use of symphonic interludes (with Shostakovich these are symphonic entre’actes). These interludes are connections between the scenes of the opera – they prepare us for the music we are about to hear in addition to summarising the material of previous scenes. The Four Sea Interludesfrom the opera Peter Grimes are frequently performed as independent works. Dawn, the first interlude, portrays a morning scene in a fishing village – the sea is calm, the air cool and pure... The second interlude, Sunday Morning, forms the introduction to Act II. The church bell summons the fishermen to morning worship... The third interlude, Moonlight, is an impressionistic sketch. The village is asleep and the moonlight, flooding in, is reflected in the peaceful waters of the harbour. The next interlude performed as part of the suite – Storm – is placed between the first and second scenes of Act I. This scene depicts the elements at their most threatening, but it also embodies the fury seething in the soul of Peter Grimes. The Four Sea Interludes were first performed in 1945 at the Cheltenham Music Festival by the London Philharmonic Orchestra with the composer conducting.

I have made mysterious Nature my religion
Claude Debussy
Following in the footsteps of Liszt, Wagner and Rimsky-Korsakov who had set examples for the poetic depiction of scenes of nature in music, Claude Debussy won a reputation as a maestro of musical “painting”. That last word conveys most clearly the essence of the incredibly subtle sounds that call forth instinctive associations with the canvasses of the French impressionists.
According to the memoirs of Marguerite Long, there was a particularly mysterious note in Debussy’s attitude to the sea. “Can you hear the sea?” he would say, “The sea is the most musical thing that there is...” Debussy was drawn by the endlessly changing colours of the sea and the ocean, the reflections of the sky, thundery clouds, the dazzling sun and the moonlight... Calm and mirror-like, majestic billows, lazily approaching the shore from the horizon, seething waves and the quietly splashing sea... Debussy gave spirit to the sea, imbuing his tableaux of it with some meaning known only to him. Does it really come as any surprise that he “repeated” the words of Musorgsky whom he so admired (which he could not actually have known!) – “...The idea of a troubled sea is incomparably more threatening and imposing than a storm”?
The three symphonic sketches La Mer are woven together as a symphony – specifically a “French” symphony, which generally has three movements. The music flows from the slow and fundamentally contemplative first section De l’Aube à midi sur la mer (From Dawn to Noon on the Sea) to Jeux de vagues (Play of the Waves) , a kind of symphonic scherzo, with its tumultuous “spills” of sound and vividly dance-like rhythms, and, ultimately, to the final Allegro which is called Dialogue du vent et de la mer (Dialogue of the Wind and the Sea) . The triumphant coda of the finale is structured around the extravagant final use of “the theme of the sea” that creates an arch between the start of the symphony and its conclusion.
La Mer was first performed on 15 October 1905 in Paris under the baton of Camille Chevillard. But Debussy’s score would only meet with true success three years later when it was conducted by the composer himself.
In 1913 Debussy conducted La Mer in St Petersburg and Moscow.
Iosif Raiskin